Now here’s an Italian oddity: an 1897 novel entitled, The
Year 3000. A Dream (L’anno 3000.
Sogno), by Paolo Mantegazza, a “Renaissance man” once described as a
“Physician-surgeon, Laboratory-experimenter, Author-editor,
Traveller-anthropologist, Professor, Sanitarian, Senator.” Well-known inside
and outside of Italy and respected by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and
Havelock Ellis among others, Mantegazza wrote some one hundred works including
treatises on medicine, psychology and education; travelogues on South America,
India, and Lapland; and novels ranging from sentimental romances to the
scientific-futuristic work discussed here. The Year 3000, a
quintessentially Italian contribution to utopian literature, comes filled with
nifty conceits, a few cringe-worthy ideas, and quite a bit of charm and humor.
I found myself laughing aloud on numerous occasions.

The Bison Books edition of The Year 3000, the first
English translation of the novel, is worth picking up if only for the rich
introduction by Nicoletta Pireddu, who offers a masterful assessment not only
of Mantegazza’s work but also of utopian literature of the era in general,
describing other utopian and science fictions from Italy and elsewhere. Some of
these – Folliero De Luna’s The Political Mysteries of the Moon, for
example - practically beg one to want to hunt them down. Pireddu also connects
Mantegazza’s novel to wider scientific ideas as well as to political debates following
Italy’s unification just 36 years before the novel’s publication.

The concept of unification is evident from the novel’s
beginning. Europe, united following a war that has ended all wars, by the year
3000 has joined the rest of the world in forming the United Planetary States
under a common language, Cosmic. A young Roman couple, Paolo and Maria, leave home
in their flying “aerotach” for an extended tour of this new world. Following a
trajectory that takes them from Rome to the Ligurian coast then to Egypt,
Ceylon and India, the couple arrives in the world’s capital at Andropolis, the
former Darjeeling, at the foot of the Himalaya, where they settle for several
months to explore its wonders, and where Maria’s impatience over a secret that
Paolo has promised to reveal there reaches a climax. Mantegazza uses the
couple’s impressions as a means to explore his vision of the fourth millennium and
as a platform for advancing his ideas concerning government, religion,
education, health, gender, race and culture.

Mantegazza anticipates many technological advances. His world
features clean energy, provided both by breaking down water into hydrogen fuel
and by organic production of electricity based on a 26th century
discovery exploiting the mechanism of bioluminescence in fireflies. Nearly
instantaneous prefab building construction assures universal housing, with a
variety of models from which to choose. Communities are meticulously planned.
The remarkable medical accomplishments of the 31st century include the
elimination of pain, advanced imaging methods to allow near instant diagnoses,
tissue engineering for quick wound repair, and the pantomass, a whole-body massage/workout suit used in gymnasiums,
and that in only a month can turn a “pale bookworm weakened by study” (present!)
“into a stout traveler.”

Some of Mantegazza’s notions of future technologies,
however, seem quaint, even retrograde. Communications employ luminous
characters on a screen but also primarily take place thanks to “the ancient
telephone…greatly improved.” The first leg of Paolo and Maria’s trip in their aerotach,
from Rome to the coastal town of LaSpezia, takes “only a few hours,” as it does
today by car. Readers may also be less than impressed to learn that human
longevity has been extended to an average age of 60. Exploration of space is
limited to more and more powerful telescopes, including one introduced late in
the novel that will finally allow humans to see the inhabitants of nearby planets.
And though Mantegazza presciently references human impact on the earth’s
climate, today’s climate scientists might demur with his treatment of the
subject. In the year 3000, humans have “so deftly controlled the forces of
nature that it was enough to direct a strong current of warm air towards the
poles to melt the immense ice formations that once occupied the polar zone,”
thus cooling Europe by replacing the deserts of Africa with a vast new sea,
seen lapping at the foot of the pyramids of Giza when Paolo and Maria swing through
Egypt.

In terms of human moral, psychological and social development,
Mantegazza’s ideas seem more at home and range more extensively, revealing the
writer’s intense interest in psychology, evolutionary biology, and an “elastic”
and “proteiform” human nature. In fact, in the year 3000, “Philosophy has been
banned…even in name, and replaced by psychology and anthropology.” Religious
tolerance abounds, but religion as known in the 19th century has
been replaced with belief in “an imaginary
God” who serves as a repository for vague spiritual yearnings (the italics
are the author’s - readers may be forgiven for laughing at that). Mantegazza’s
emphasis is on the practical betterment of humankind, towards which he places
enormous faith in individuals gently governed by an elite of the wise.

Among Paolo and Maria’s stops on their travels is Ceylon,
known as the Island of Experiments, a living museum of political systems. These
include transparently-named metropolises such as the socialistic Equality and
the dictatorial Tyrannopolis, as well as less evident smaller agglomerations
like Monachia, “a small city made up entirely of nuns devoted to the cult of
Sappho.” Something objectionable can be found here for those of almost any
political persuasion. These systems, however, allow people to test alternatives
to the world government seated at Andropolis, a vision both utopian and
dystopian. While governmental power has become extremely de-centralized, the
decisions of the elite entrusted with limited central governing include dramatic
intrusions into private life, such as ascertaining whether a couple is fit for
marriage and parenting and in fact whether babies demonstrate enough fortitude
to merit not being incinerated. The book’s most morally ambiguous scene
presents a young mother faced with not only the wrenching decision of whether
to keep her “weak” baby or have it destroyed, but also a crass doctor who tells
her: “Your baby has no awareness that it exists, and its elimination procedure
is neither painful nor lengthy. A minute will reduce it to smoke and a small
heap of ashes you can keep. You’re young still; you can remarry and bear other
children.”

Though Maria in this scene serves as a moral foil to the
doctor’s abysmal bedside manner, Mantegazza’s own attitudes towards women
express a mixture of liberality and fustiness. All women have the franchise and
divorce is a universal right, but the gender roles displayed in the novel are
nearly as conventional as Mantegazza’s linear narrative style. Maria defers
almost entirely to Paolo, describing herself at one point as “an ignorant
little woman” then expressing amazement at her ability to grasp politics.
Women, in Mantegazza’s “dream,” seem to have little place in science or
industry, and are excluded from certain places, such as Andropolis’ Temple of
Deists.

Though a faith in eugenics appears to run through The
Year 3000, as is evident in the destruction of frail babies, Mantegazza’s
treatment of race and ethnicity appears largely progressive. Increased
comingling between different peoples has produced among humans “…a new type,
indefinitely cosmopolitan.” However, Mantegazza’s choices in relating the
complete disappearance of various ethnicities (sorry, aboriginal Australians
and Maori!) may reveal a certain racial tension; the intercourse between the
world’s peoples means that “in Africa there is no longer a single pure black
person.”

Despite Mantegazza’s faith in cosmopolitanism and globalism,
The Year 3000 possesses a charming Italo-centrism. Early on, Paolo
revels in translating for Maria from Cosmic into the “dead” language of Italian,
asserting that “never did another language have a nobler, greater geneology.” He
extolls its having produced among the finest writers in history. Many, if not
most, of the historical figures alluded to in The Year 3000 are Italian,
and Mantegazza frequently digresses into issues with a particularly Italian
flavor.

But perhaps the most charming element in The Year 3000: A
Dream is Mantegazza’s depiction of the arts and entertainments of
Andropolis, a city of ten million that contains an impressive “fifty theaters”
(whatever the merits of Mantegazza’s imagination, his notion of a city of ten
million people lacks realistic scale). To give the reader an idea of the capital’s
cultural life, the narrator provides a marvelous three-page list of a sample
day’s theatrical offerings. These include a production of Hamlet (in Cosmic) at the Theatre of Classical Tragedy; Sophocles’ Oedipus at the Panglosse (in ancient
Greek and “reserved for the highly cultured”); a stage spectacular featuring
“the cycle of cosmic pleasure, from Homer to the year 3000”; and a show in
which the only performers are “speaking flowers, walking plants, and whispering
meadows,” and which “depicts the struggle of monocotyledonous of coal-bearing
soil against plants of the modern era.” There’s also a kind of electric
Kool-Aid acid test sound and light experience and a revue of showgirls.

And of course there are books. It’s disappointing that
Mantegazza doesn’t devote more of his vision to art and literature, but it’s
clear where his prejudices lie. While praising Italy as having throughout its
history stood at the pinnacle of human artistic expression, the narrator notes a
blotch on that record around the end of the 19th century, when artists
turned to impressionism, pointillism and decadence, a period that also witnessed
the nadir of Italian literature as decadent writers produced an “epidemic of
Preraphaelitism, of the superhuman, that affected very high and powerful
minds.” As an example, the narrator offers Gabriele d’Annunzio, who, instead of being
“one of the great masters,” became “merely a great neurasthenic of Italian
literature.”

Of course, since Paolo and Maria are on vacation, they take
along some reading material. Of chief interest to them is a book written “ten
centuries earlier by a physician with a bizarre imagination who tried to guess
what human life would be like a millennium on,” which Paolo intends to
translate as they travel, both out of curiosity as to “how well this prophet
guessed the future” and in expectation of finding in the book “some beauties to
laugh about.” With another 984 years still left to go until Mantegazza’s future
arrives, one can already, in 2016, enjoy both his prophecies and quite a few
such “beauties” – perhaps a few more than Mantegazza might have intended.

In this case, Jacqui, I found it in my favorite way: it was on the shelf in the library in the vicinity of something else I was seeking.

The body suit is fitted with thousands of tiny metallic stimulators that can provide different textures and pressures. I'm not sure whether that would be a good thing or not either, but Mantegazza certainly seems to be a fan!

For anyone interested in utopian literature, The Year 3000 is absolutely a must read. As an example of that genre, this is a real treat, one that - as the outstanding introduction notes - seems to operate at a level of imagination quite a bit more developed than most other utopian works of its time.

“a period that also witnessed the nadir of Italian literature as decadent writers produced an “epidemic of Preraphaelitism, of the superhuman, that affected very high and powerful minds.” As an example, the narrator offers Gabriel d’Annunzio, who, instead of being “one of the great masters,” became “merely a great neurasthenic of Italian literature.”

Interesting observation, of course, but the “epidemic of Preraphaelitism, of the superhuman, that affected very high and powerful minds” was a European phenomenon not just an Italian one. Freud, symbolists, syphilis, femme fatale, Schnitzler, Rodenbach, Munch, Maeterlinck, Berg . . .and all sorts of other key words. Oddly enough, the only source denied English only readers is d’Annunzio.

The flip side of Mantegazza's charming Italo-centrism is that he has blinders on when it comes to the rest of the world. And it's fairly astonishing that of Italian writers, he only mentions (aside from a handful from Roman antiquity) Dante, Carlo Porta, and d'Annunzio.

I should have mentioned a bit more about Mantegazza's own ostensible aesthetics as displayed in The Year 3000. The architecture of Andropolis sounds rather austere and Neo-classical, and the capital features a few immense, symbolic and unbelievably kitsch statues that might not look out of place in North Korea.

On d'Annunzio . . .yes, agreed but "once was." If one has access to a good library with a big collection of old stuff, d'Annunzio can be found. But for new glittery translations . . .not much.

Accepting arguments concerning the quality of his prose, the quality of his politics, the quality of his love life, it's shallow to teach Italian Literature without a look at his body of work. One book and a poetry or two collection, just doesn't reflect what d'Annuzio was to Italian Literature. I, regularly, beat a drum on this topic, apparently to a non-existent audience.

I beg to differ! Il Piacere was translated anew in 2013 by Lara Raffaelli for Penguin Classics - a most needed endeavour given the only translation then available was the prudishly mutilated one by Georgina Harding! (Brilliant blog, btw!)

Thanks for the comment. I mention the new translation of Il Piacere in my more recent post on D'Annunzio, as well as an even newer translation of Notturno. I'm not aware of other such translations in the pipeline, but at least some of the "prudish mutilation" appears to be getting remediation.

Strangely enough, in moving some books around last night, out of one of them fell my "passport" to the 1980's interactive theater production of John Krizanc's Tamara, set at d'Annuzio's Lake Garda villa. It's about the closest I've yet come to knowing anything about the writer - and a rather poor means of becoming informed, from what I've gathered - so, Tom, I'll accept your kind nomination and will get over to the library promptly.

I suppose you have to do Il Piacere and L'innocente. They're not my favorites. Avoid all Georgina Harding translations because they were considerably "cleaned up" for English speaking readers. My favorite was the nasty little novel Giovanni Episcopo. One of his short stories, San Pantaleone,available in a collection of Italian short stories at Gutenberg, bears an uncanny resemblance to Suskind's Perfume.

Also, I'm curious about the play Tamara. In Paris, I saw a show of her work in which her letters to d'Annunzio were included. In one, she firmly refused an affair with him because she didn't want to take syphilis home to her husband, whom she rather liked.

Tamara from what I gather and recall, was nearly void of anything of substance having to do with d'Annunzio or de Lempicka. It was, instead, all about the novelty of having the audience run around in a villa following a character to whom they were assigned. A meal was served at intermission. For Los Angeles, where it ran for years, it was the perfect popular production, allowing the audience to run around in a spectacular house and feel involved in the sordid affairs of celebrities without having to be bothered with a single thought. The best part of it by far was the house itself.